


i think i've known for a while now (i think you have, too)

by bringyouhometoo



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:57:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bringyouhometoo/pseuds/bringyouhometoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Set during the 200 years the Doctor spends running from Lake Silencio in Series 6. I should warn for mentions of character death, but no one dies in the fic.</p>
    </blockquote>





	i think i've known for a while now (i think you have, too)

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the 200 years the Doctor spends running from Lake Silencio in Series 6. I should warn for mentions of character death, but no one dies in the fic.

He wants to see her, one last time. He’s spent 200 years running from what’s to come; he doesn’t want to go without her knowing why.

It takes him a while to find a way in — a tiny gap in the Allison Nebula that leads to an uninhabited planet a whole universe away and, it feels like, half a universe away from where he needs to be. No matter, the TARDIS can get him there and back here again — but he spends some time stabilising the gap, just in case.

A short flight later, and he’s materialising in London, England, Earth; London as he knows it, except for the zeppelins.

And  _Rose_.

She’s here somewhere, he knows — he’s almost tempted to track her using the scanner, but that would feel too much like cheating, so he simply locks the TARDIS doors and steps out into a new universe to look for her.

The first place he tries is Pete’s estate, and he finds it abandoned and a little cobwebbed, with a peeling FOR SALE sign and a newer SOLD one stuck into the front lawn. He starts to worry, at that.

He looks for traces of her in registry offices, in newspapers, on TV. Nothing. He looks for Pete and for Jackie, and finds only a small mention of the ‘Fall from Grace of Pete Tyler’s Empire’ in a newspaper printed five years ago. He’s experienced enough to know the signs — to know that someone’s been into the records and systematically deleted every mention of them — and begins to suspect something bad.

Torchwood, of course, refuse to help him, he’s just a young bloke in a tweed jacket looking for someone they’ve chosen to hide and forget and obliterate, and he daren’t risk revealing himself. He’s got a feeling he might know why the Tylers disappeared, and if he’s right, then to put himself in the hands of these people would be his end.

He’s at a loss until he thinks of one last place.

~

“Come on, then, you, let’s get home.”

A woman in her thirties, late twenties at a push, holds out her hand to the boy on the swings; he jumps down reluctantly, but runs to her soon enough, his chubby toddler’s legs still at odds with his gangly height — he’s four, maybe five years old — and takes her hand. “Can we have chips?”

“ _We’ll see,_  I said, didn’t I? Now quickly, looks like it’s gonna rain in a bit — you too, Donna!”

The girl looks up from where she’s been reading, hidden away at the top of the slide. Her face is unfocused and strangely disorientated — she’s been lost in her book — and there’s hair in her eyes, but the indignant expression is plain enough. “But  _mum_ , I’m  _reading_ , I can walk back in a sec, you go ahead—”

“ _No_ , I said, it’s gonna be chucking it down in a bit. Now come on, help me with tea and you can have the telly tonight, all right?”

The girl — Donna, her name is, she looks around eight or nine — brightens up, and she slams the book shut before pushing off and sliding down to join her mum and brother. “Can it be the nature video?”

“We’ll see.”

They begin to make their way towards the block of flats that he knows so well — Donna chattering and her brother trying to keep up and Rose listening to both of them with a patiently tired look in her eyes — and then the Doctor can’t hold himself back any longer. 

He springs up from the bench he’s been sitting on, and sprints after them.

“Excuse me - hello?” He’s too far back, they’re going to go inside any second now —“Hey!  _Rose_!”

Her name makes her turn around.

Her expression doesn’t change, just takes in the hair and the bow-tie and the gangliness and the posture and the eyes, and then she let’s her chidlrens’ hands go without taking her eyes off him. “Take Mickey inside. Nanna will let you in.”

“But mum—”

“Who is that—”

“I said, go.”

Donna and Mickey retreat, eyeing the Doctor with open mistrust and a little dislike; as soon as they’re gone, she’s closing the gap between them, a sob wrenching from between her lips, and then those lips are on his and her arms are wrapped around him and she’s Rose, all pink and yellow and soft and safe and warm and  _Rose_  and  _his_  —

Except she isn’t, and he can’t do this, not when he’s here to say goodbye.

He pulls back with a touch of finality that he knows she picks up on, and she nods quietly, although her eyes are slightly blurred and her cheeks are slightly red.

~

They walk up the hill together, hands not linked but brushing occasionally, and talk. Rose tells him — and he gets the feeling she hasn’t been able to tell anyone, not for a while now, because no one else _can_  know — what happened, to Torchwood and to the Doctor ( _her_  Doctor, the human one) and to her family.

And the Doctor ( _this_  one, the Time Lord one, the one who isn’t hers because he didn’t let it happen) feels sick to his bones.

They took him. They  _took_  him, and they looked at him, and they decided that the possibilities of giving humans a touch of Time Lord were too big of an opportunity to pass up.

He’s been gone ten years now, and Rose says she hopes he’s been dead for nine at least but thinks they might  _still_  have him somewhere, hooked up to machines to keep the essence of life running through him, as they tear into his body and his flesh and try to turn themselves or their children or their children’s children into gods.

“We had to hide,” she says quietly. “Jake got us out, he’s the one who went and got all the old news reports and files so we could try and start again, he’s still working for them but he’s trying to do something good… He helped us, set us up with a new life, new identities, new everything.”

“You’re safe, then?” He asks, and it’s the first time he’s said anything in a while; his voice is cracked and broken.

“Safe enough.”

That’s not enough for him — but there’s nothing else he thinks he can do. “And your mum? Your dad?”

Rose’s face darkens. “Mum’s with us…” she begins quietly, looking away. “Pete’s the head of Torchwood.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh god.”

“Yeah.”

“Rose, I’m so, so, sorry—”

She cuts him off with a look. “Don’t apologise, don’t you  _dare_ , okay? This wasn’t you.”

“I left you here—”

“I chose this.”

“I didn’t really let you choose, and—”

“He chose this. He must have known something might happen, and he still chose this. And we had years, Doctor! Years in a house with a mortgage, and a wedding and a honeymoon, and Donna, and before he went I’d told him Mick was on the way… It’s longer than  _we_  would have had, isn’t it?” 

He knows she’s talking about her and him — knows she’s telling him that she doesn’t blame him for forcing her hand, for not letting her stay with him — and exhales softly, nodding.

“You never said,” Rose prompts after a while. “What’re you doing here, anyway?”

He shrugs, and his face spasms — can he do this to her? Now that he knows? After all she’s suffered?

Yes. He  _has_  to. He owes her honesty, at least.

“I’m…time’s going wrong,” he says eventually. “ _Badly_  wrong, that’s why I could come here, the universe is falling apart back at my end. And  _I_  can stop it, but I’ve been running from it for…a long time now. And I wanted to — see you, before I go.”

She gives him one long look — and then begins to shake her head. “No.”

“Rose, I have to.”

“No, you  _can’t_.” Her whole body is shaking, now.

“There isn’t another way. I have to do this, and I have to do it soon.”

“But you’re — you’re the  _Doctor_ , we need you, this whole universe and every universe, and there’s _only_  you, and when he went he, he  _told_  me not to worry, that if ever something  _bad_  happened in this universe he was sure you’d be here at the drop of a hat, and you can’t  _go_ , you’re the Doctor and oh god don’t die don’t die don’t die—”

She pitches forward, and he catches her, holding her close to his hearts and breathing in the scent of her and letting her tears soak into his jacket.

There might be some tears in his eyes, too, but he doesn’t mention them, or acknowledge them in any way; he has to be strong, he thinks.

“Rose,” he says gently, when she pulls back to rub at her eyes, and he savours the roll of her name on his tongue, the drawn-out  _R_ , the short and sweet and insignificant ‘ _oh_ ’ sound that he wishes he could hold on to, the slight hiss of the  _s_  pushing past his lips. “I can’t stay. Not for long.”

“Oh  _god_.”

“I just — I’m sorry, this wasn’t fair on you, I just —  _needed_  to. See you.”

“No, it’s — thank you.”

“Can I—” He hesitates; but what’s there left to be afraid of? “Can I meet them? The, the, the children I mean?”

She bites back a grin. “Have to get past my mum first,” she says, standing up from the hillside and holding out a hand to him. “But yeah, of — of  _course_.”

They walk back into the Powell Estate slowly, palms pressed together and fingers intertweince and pulses racing together — her single heartbeat the point to his double pulse’s counterpoint.

There’s a moment, before they reach the flat, when he’s overwhelmed with an urgency and a need and a desperate, foolish, desire to tell her, to leave no loose ends, to let her hear him say it and to let _himself_  say it, out loud, right now, before he has to go—

He can’t, though.

He  _can’t_. It’s been 200 years for him, and ten for her, and he can’t open that old wound again. Not now, not after everything, not with everything that he’s yet to face.


End file.
